For more on the Environmental Working Group, please visit ActivistCash.com. Here are a few tidbits from our profile:

While flacking a 1999 report called How ‘Bout Them Apples? (a predictable diatribe warning that a million American kids were in grave danger from chemical residues on apples), EWG’s Todd Hettenbach told United Press International that “just a bite or two of an apple, peach or pear, which had legal residues of [the insecticide] methyl parathion, could cause dizziness, nausea and blurred vision” in a child. One federal EPA consultant told Fox News that Hettenbach’s claims were “totally off the wall.”

In its 1997 report entitled Tough to Swallow: How Pesticide Companies Profit from Poisoning America’s Tap Water, EWG carped about levels of a herbicide called atrazine in Midwestern water supplies. The federally imposed safety limit for that chemical is 3.0 parts per billion, but EWG claimed (falsely) that a level 20-fold smaller violated federal safety requirements. When the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency learned that EWG had essentially fabricated its own safety standards, one official remarked: “We’re concerned when reports like this come out because they’re making comparisons based on levels that don’t exist.”

Richard Wiles, the executive who cooked up EWG’s 1996 “Shopper’s Guide,” insisted that his intention wasn’t to steer consumers away from fresh produce in general, but he readily admitted an organic agenda. “Our basic recommendation is to buy organic produce whenever you can get it,” he told The Chicago Tribune. But what sort of “experts” are really behind this recommendation? When investigative reporter Matt Labash asked Wiles this very question, he got a surprising answer. “Richard Wiles, the group’s vice president of research,” Labash wrote in The Weekly Standard, “conceded to me that the Environmental Working Group does not have a single doctor or scientist on staff.”